Computers require service, as do most complex systems. It is common in the information technology industry for various services (ordering, upgrading, maintenance, replacement) to be provided on an outsourced basis by a service provider. Service providers often provide services at higher quality and at lower cost than the staff of a company that owns the computers. This is due to economies of scale; creation, sustenance and refinement of specialized skills on the staff of the service provider; and specialized infrastructure created by and for the service provider.
Service providers commonly contract with a customer to provide a specific set of services. These services are provided at a certain service level, and the clauses of a contract concerning service levels are commonly referred to as Service Level Agreements, or SLAs. A service level of a service specifies, among other things, how quickly the service is to be initiated when a request is made by customers. A service level may also specify the duration of the service and other quantities descriptive of service delivery. In current practice, SLAs are written for static service levels. For example, a typical SLA specifies a four-hour response to a maintenance request to fix an inoperable computer.
In today's fast-paced, dynamic business environment, both the circumstances of need and the context of service delivery may vary. By “context” is meant the circumstances under which a service is delivered. For example, it may be necessary that a business's computers be highly available at a certain time of the month, because that time reflects a time of high sales or externally-imposed deadlines. Similarly, the delivery of services to a mobile computer may be lengthier if that computer is located off the customer's premises and can communicate only over a telephone line. It is to the advantage of both the customer and the service provider to agree to SLAs that take account of the specific context of the delivery of a service.
When a customer of a service provider selects services, one consideration may be that different employees of that customer may have different needs for services, and needs for service levels for those services as a function of their position in the customer's organization or their functional responsibility. It is to be appreciated that in today's dynamic organizational context a given service consumer may have different functional responsibilities at different times. Thus it is advantageous for the organizational affiliation, functional responsibility and other such consumer attributes to be considered as part of the context in which the service is provided.
Similarly, when services are selected it may be advantageous to only offer services known to be of value to specific industries, or in specific countries. Although a regulatory environment for a given enterprise is often determined by the country in which it operates, a given enterprise may itself be subject to specific regulation; the regulatory environment may differ according to location or even according to a task to be performed. Thus it is advantageous for the industry type and regulatory environment, however it is determined, to be considered part of the context in which the service is provided. In addition to the aforementioned, there may be other considerations advantageously included in the context in which the service is provided.
In addition to these desired attributes of a new type of service level agreement, numerous problems in the field of service level agreements have been encountered. In particular, services are often provided in a dynamic environment, where several service delivery variables can significantly impact the timeliness and cost of a service. In such situations, relatively static service level agreements are of little use to the parties to a contemplated service delivery transaction in specifying realistic contract terms that cover a range of possible service delivery scenarios.
Service consumers may find that the service contracted for is too costly and that a less responsive service would have been satisfactory, or the exact opposite—that the service contracted for is not responsive enough and that the added cost of a more responsive service would have been justified. Service providers may find that an agreed-to service delivery may have been based on unrealistic and too-optimistic resource availability estimates. In such situations, the service provider will absorb the added cost associated with acquisition of the scarce resource, thereby lessening expected profits.
Other problems are encountered. Once a service level agreement has been agreed to, and a service delivery event has occurred, actions will need to be taken to actually deliver the service. In situations where relatively static service level agreements have been entered into, the service provider may have little idea about how best to deliver the service. A service provider may over-subscribe a costly resource to provide the service at an agreed-to level, in essence actually providing a higher-quality (and more expensive) service than is necessary.
Further problems have been encountered in the field of service level agreements. After a service delivery event has been identified and service delivery has commenced, the parties often have no way to measure whether the service is being provided at the desired service level during the period when the service is actually being delivered. The parties, in fact, may never know, because an after-the-fact analysis may not have access to facts surrounding the service delivery as it occurred due to the often fleeting nature of such information.
Accordingly, those skilled in the art seek methods and apparatus implementing service level agreements having these desirable attributes and overcoming these problems.